Heavy Water

Martin Amis Heavy Water (1998)
Never having paid much attention to literature, or at least what is generally held to be literature, I tend to discover authors more or less by accident, excepting those whose books have robots and spaceships on the cover. This is probably why Martin Amis has pretty much passed me by until now. I'm aware of his being the spawn of Kingsley, but then I only read New Maps of Hell relatively recently, and then because it discusses books which have robots and spaceships on the cover. I've heard of London Fields, although I'm not sure why, and have mostly encountered the name of Martin Amis in relation to Will Self, usually in dismissive terms suggesting that Self and Amis think they're all lush because they use long, fancy words but really they aren't lush because they're just stuck up and think they're clever and better than the rest of us. I think this means we're not supposed to read their works because only people who've spent at least five years working on the bins are allowed to write novels; which is bollocks because Will Self at least has patently produced some crackers.

Anyway, it seemed time I gave Martin Amis a shot and I found this one - short stories, which I always think is a good place to start.

Assuming there has, at some point, been fuss, then I can certainly see what it was - or possibly is - about. I assume Amis being so often paired off with Will Self is, aside from their both having gone to good schools, down to their respective fictions being, if not Swiftian, then something in that direction, and in this case so much so as to allow for The Janitor of Mars, which is science-fiction as much as anything and reads as though he's taking the piss out of Stephen Baxter. Despite frequent playdates within the same reviews, it would be difficult to mistake Amis for Self or vice versa. On the strength of the stories here, Amis is a lot more direct and it would probably be difficult to accuse him of self-indulgence with any conviction. Thematically, the two of them inhabit similar territory, but probably not to the point of it being worth discussing.

The last two in this collection of nine were a little underwhelming: What Happened to Me on My Holiday is written in a phonetic approximation of some regional dialect, and the story doesn't quite reward the effort of translation; and Straight Fiction inverts established gender preferences to comic effect - Hollywood stars exposed as secret heterosexuals etc. etc. - but doesn't quite live up to the promise of the gag. The rest, however, are fucking astonishing. Amis' writing grips the reader like hands physically emerging from the open pages to grasp you by the shoulders. He intrigues from the first sentence, presenting such peculiar combinations of people and the lives they've ended up living that you can't not want to find out where the fuck it's going to go, because there's nothing predictable, nothing promising specific conclusions, not even in the inversion narratives of the aforementioned Straight Fiction, or Career Move which swaps mumbling poetry circles for Hollywood glitz and bullshit without so much as a knowing smirk. Although the last two don't quite pay out in full, everything here does something fucking weird whilst communicating the same in terms so immediately accessible, even populist, as to be dizzying.

I wish it hadn't taken me so long to get here, but never mind.

The Space Merchants

Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth The Space Merchants (1952)
It has been impressed upon me for the last couple of years, or at least since I read New Maps of Hell, that this was the Kornbluth collaboration I really needed to read. I therefore kept looking, despite A Mile Beyond the Moon and others; and at last, here we are.

I thought it would be funnier, and I'm not sure it entirely lives up to expectations - although my expectations were fairly nebulous - but otherwise, yes - I can see that the hype is at least partially justified. Written in the fifties, The Space Merchants predicts a future which has turned out unfortunately like the present and, oddly, foreshadows Philip K. Dick's projections of where capitalism was headed - could be either the influence of this book or great minds thinking alike. Where Dick would incorporate the occasional scene of advertising drones attaching themselves to the hood of one's flying car and attempting to sell you toothpaste while you're trying to concentrate on driving, here the emphasis is much heavier, darker, arguably more sarcastic - maybe like a more overtly dystopian take on Mad Men.

The writing is lively and literate without ever quite crossing over into the jabbering of which Kornbluth was occasionally guilty, and it has the feel of one of those science-fiction novels you can usually smuggle in under the radar of those who might ordinarily wrinkle noses unless it's Wells or Wyndham. Our tale relates the story of an advertising executive who falls from grace and ends up fighting for survival at the bottom end of the economic totem pole, a victim of those forces he once helped perpetuate. Inevitably, his fall from grace brings an awakening, although I have to admit I found the last quarter - from chapter fourteen onwards - a little bewildering and hence unsatisfying in comparison with that which went before, although not enough so as to diminish the whole.

As an aside, the suffering underclass here depicted as justifiably disgruntled bordering on heroic suggests that Kornbluth's supposed sympathy for eugenics - as implied by The Marching Morons and The Little Black Bag - is far from being so cut and dried an argument as his critics have alleged. For my taste The Space Merchants could have used a bit more atmosphere, but it's otherwise decent.

Who?

Algis Budrys Who? (1958)
This was written a year before The Falling Torch, the only other one I've read by Algis Budrys, and is informed by many of the same cold war preoccupations. I'm not sure if this is due to the era or just Budrys working out some of the baggage of his eastern European origin, hailing from a country occupied by the Nazis and then the Soviet Union. I seem to remember enjoying The Falling Torch, even if it was a bit single-minded in its focus, and Who? is mostly the same deal. I'm not really convinced that he was ever the best science-fiction author since H.G. Wells, as Kingsley Amis put it.

The story is faithful to Asimov's edict of good science-fiction only ever containing one element of the fantastic or implausible - an edict which I'd say is proven demonstrably and unnecessarily Cromwellian by A.E. van Vogt - and here the element is Lucas Martino, our main man. He's the scientist behind some important but poorly defined breakthrough, and so he's been taken prisoner by those weasely Soviets. We don't know if he revealed his secrets, but now they've given him back, except he was a bit poorly so they fixed him by giving him a metal head; and this means we can't actually be sure it's Martino. It may even be some guy the reds have sent to steal the secret of whatever Martino was working on, and so on and so forth.

It works fine if we assume Martino's fingerprints were never taken and that they were yet to develop DNA testing, but I found it difficult to really appreciate the weight of a story so grounded in cold war politics, given that we now know it was all bluff and bullshit. There are other problems too, notably the contrast between whatever advanced technology might furnish a guy with a metal head, and the rest of the world inhabited by these people. For example, released back into society, Martino goes to a pharmacy and asks to use their telephone, all the while trailed by government agents waiting to see what he'll do, whether he'll give himself away as an imposter. Once Martino has made his call and left, our agents take the phone books from the pharmacy so as to inspect them and hopefully deduce just who it was that Martino could have called by looking for the tell tale signs of pressure left by a finger running up and down a single page in search of a particular number. They obtain the directories by ingeniously sending a guy into the pharmacy under the pretence of using the phone, a guy with a suitcase containing identical phone books which he substitutes for those to which Martino referred. The whole operation is laboured, bewildering, and doesn't do much for one's suspension of disbelief. Why? might have been a better title.

So the espionage is all unfortunately fairly dull.

On the other hand, Budrys alternates espionage with glimpses of Martino's youth, back before he had a metal head. The detail is lovely, haunting, and beautifully written, and I would assume it was such passages which inspired Kingsley Amis to draw the comparison with Wells. Who? is a decent novel, but for reasons other than those which seemed most crucial to whoever wrote the blurb on the back cover, and it probably would have made for a better short story.

Search the Sky

Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth Search the Sky (1954, revised 1985)
Kingsley Amis has impressed upon me the wisdom of picking up anything I see by Pohl and Kornbluth, and although I was sort of looking for The Space Merchants, obviously I wasn't going to just walk past this one.

Search the Sky isn't either quite so bonkers or so convincing as Wolfbane but is mostly of the same generally high standard and takes a similarly Swiftian angle. Humanity has spread itself across the universe, with contact between increasingly isolated colonies rendered impractical by sheer distance. A ship arrives from one of the nearest colonies - as is anticipated every few hundreds of years - but the distant descendants of the original crew - the people on board the ship back when it first began its journey - seem idiotic. Ross, a young trader, wonders if this degenerative state has befallen the other outposts of humanity, just as it seems to have befallen both the visitors and the stagnating culture of his own world; and so he is let in on an extremely well-kept secret, namely that there is one ship which can travel faster than light, and thus is he charged with answering his own question.

Ross visits a succession of human colonies, each more ridiculous than the next, each sunk into ruin by failing political systems. Here the scope for parody is considerable, and the authors have a lot of fun with it, not least with the gerontocracy in which only the most aged are presumed to possess wisdom sufficient for leadership.

There was sickening fright on Helena's face. 'Didn't you hear? We have to vote for the best man. Oldest is Bestest, you know. That's what Democracy means, the freedom of choice. They read us the ages, and we choose which is oldest. Now please, Ross, hurry before somebody starts asking questions!'

Each failing society is characterised by the infantilisation and repression of the majority by a minority elite, although some examples make for better metaphors than others. Whilst the society encountered immediately following the gerontocracy makes its points through the agency of a matriarchal dictatorship, the lightness of tone steers it a little too close to The Worm That Turned from The Two Ronnies.

Finally we end up back on Earth to find a technologically advanced human civilisation apparently comprised of dunderheads, Laurel & Hardy fall guys, the inhabitants of a thousand sight gags ending with some guy left holding a tin tub up against the ceiling with a broom handle. These are more or less the people encountered in Kornbluth's The Marching Morons, so it's fairly entertaining. I must admit to a certain degree of unease when dealing with anything suggesting that an excess of stupidity is to the ultimate detriment of the human race - despite what I myself may or may not have implied about the devotees of certain television shows during the course of previous reviews. It's a sentiment which can sometimes appear to steer a little too close to eugenics for my liking - see also shitty neofolk acts bemoaning the fall of European culture without actually naming any names just in case anyone gets the right idea. Thankfully here the fall from grace is deduced as having arisen from the state of isolation experienced by the dividing branches of humanity, so scapegoats are mercifully absent.

Search the Sky is no Wolfbane, as I say, and the point of the narrative is sometimes defeated by its own meandering tone if you really want to be picky; but it's otherwise a decent read, and it's funny in all the right places.

New Maps of Hell

Kingsley Amis New Maps of Hell (1960)
The Trillion Year Spree of Brian Aldiss and that other guy seems to be the title which always comes up when anyone mentions they're after some sort of history of science-fiction. New Maps of Hell appears to have less of a reputation, and I had assumed this would be due to it being earlier - hence less up to date - and shorter; but no, it's probably because it's not a history of science-fiction so much as an analysis which inevitably incorporates a level of historical detail.

By history of science-fiction, I'm referring to the written form, having all but given up on other media - possibly excepting comic books - and having read this, I feel I have a better understanding of why I should have all but given up on other media. Amis himself, writing in 1960, didn't see much of a future for science-fiction as moving image, although he refers to the BBC's Quatermass as a positive development. Taking his mapping of the history of written science-fiction as logical and roughly reflective of the evolution of the genre, I'd suggest it could be argued that film and television have developed as something almost entirely separate and have as such become stuck at the Edgar Rice Burroughs stage, despite that brief evolutionary surge of early 1970s brainy films which was pretty much killed off by Star Wars.

Anyway, Amis may cover less ground than Aldiss, but I find this the more likeable text. It's a while since I read Trillion Year Spree, so my recall of some details may be off kilter, but the tone here seems significantly friendlier. As an author, Kingsley Amis had no horse in this particular race, and he writes with enthusiasm and nothing to prove, nor any axe to grind. He acknowledges certain works as being unreadable in such kindly, almost indulgent terms as to make Aldiss' slagging of John Wyndham sound like some glass-jawed pub bore endlessly droning on about all the fights he's won and just who should be glad of not yet having crossed his path. In addition, Amis lays down a convincing argument for Gulliver's Travels as the first science-fiction novel, which I personally regard as a better choice than Frankenstein as proposed by Aldiss.

Anyway, regardless - as I say this is an analysis of science-fiction as a genre rather than a history in conventional terms, presenting a snappy summation of its purpose, how it works, why it works, and why it sometimes falls on its arse whilst additionally acknowledging that sometimes it can be just ripping yarns of rockets and bug-eyed monsters. Amis clearly loved his subject, so there's no anthropological sneering, and he patently had no desire to get into fist-fights. The argument remains conversational whilst presenting something resembling academic rigour. I personally think he misses the joy of both van Vogt and Simak, and I suppose that's my only criticism, but this is otherwise a lovely read; and one that has convinced me I need to be on the lookout for more by Frederik Pohl.